Wilderness / Sophistication

WILDERNESS / SOPHISTICATION

By Faye Hammill

THE ECCLES CENTRE FOR AMERICAN STUDIESwww.bl.uk/ecclescentre

The Seventh Eccles Centre for AmericanStudies Plenary Lecture given at theBritish Association for Canadian StudiesAnnual Conference, 2012

Published by The British LibraryThe design, setting and camera ready copy was produced at The British Library Corporate Design Office

ISBN 0 7123 4464 0

Copyright © 2012 The British Library Board

WILDERNESS / SOPHISTICATION

By Faye Hammill

THE ECCLES CENTRE FOR AMERICAN STUDIESwww.bl.uk/ecclescentre

The Seventh Eccles Centre for AmericanStudies Plenary Lecture given at theBritish Association for Canadian StudiesAnnual Conference, 2012

Faye Hammill is Professor of English at the University of Strathclyde. Herresearch areas are early twentieth-century literature and Canadian studies. She is author of Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History (2010), winner of the European Society for the Study of English book award; Women,Celebrity and Literary Culture Between the Wars (2007), Canadian Literature(2007), and Literary Culture and Female Authorship in Canada, 1760–2000(2003), winner of the International Council for Canadian Studies book prize.She established the AHRC Middlebrow Network in 2008, and is currentlyleading another AHRC-funded project, ‘Magazines, Travel and MiddlebrowCulture in Canada, 1925–1960’. She is an associate editor of the InternationalJournal of Canadian Studies and former editor of the British Journal ofCanadian Studies.

Wilderness / Sophistication

Dandelion itself – dent de lion. Tulip, tülbend, turban. … The roots of words, like the roots of plants and flowers, going deep into

the old earth of their beginnings.Audrey Thomas, 'Prospero on the Island ' (231)

Recently I have been focusing my research on the history of a single word –‘sophistication’. I have explored its intricate and changing meanings in thecontexts of British, American and French writing and culture. For a long time, it did not occur to me to consider the resonances of ‘sophistication’ in Canada. I have begun to wonder whether the dominance of wilderness mythology inCanadian culture might be the reason for this blind spot on my part. This paperoffers a preliminary exploration of the sets of ideas and images which coherearound these two notions of wilderness and sophistication. It considers the ways in which they are constructed as opposites in Canadian writing, and suggests that, within the literary structures of pastoral, they may interpenetrate.

The dynamic between wilderness and sophistication might be traced through avast range of Canadian literary texts, but I will restrict myself to one region andperiod, focusing on three mid-twentieth-century novellas set in British Columbia.They were all reprinted in a 1987 anthology of Canadian novellas edited byDouglas Daymond and Leslie Monkman, entitled On Middle Ground. This book is an interesting artefact of literary history. The authors represented in it –Clark Blaise, Keath Fraser, Mavis Gallant, Malcolm Lowry, John Metcalf, AudreyThomas, and Ethel Wilson – are some of the finest post-war Canadian fictionwriters, yet they have fallen out of fashion with readers and critics alike. Indeed,the title of the anthology seems inadvertently to position them in an awkward in-between place. ‘Middle ground’ is a phrase with multiple resonances. In termsof form, it refers to an intermediate fictional genre, often occupying an uncertainposition in the literary canon. In terms of period or generation, these mid-centurywriters do not quite belong with either the modernists or the postmodernists. In a national context, ‘middle ground’ recalls Robert Kroetsch’s view of Canadianwriting as ‘the literature of dangerous middles’,1 a suggestive description whichwas later picked up by Stephen Slemon in his account of ‘colonialism’s middle

WILDERNESS / SOPHISTICATION 1

1 Daymond and Monkman mention Kroetsch’s phrase in their Introduction (2). It is from ‘BeyondNationalism: A Prologue’, published in Mosaic 14.2 (1981), and reprinted in The LovelyTreachery of Words (p.71). The phrase has been variously interpreted in relation to Canada'sgeography, history, and political status: see Creelman; Kirtz; Tiefensee 77-78.

ground’ (110) – that is, the ambivalent location of the white settler who is bothcolonizer and colonized. Finally, in connection with pastoral, the title of theanthology evokes Leo Marx’s notion of the 'middle landscape', which underpinshis discussion of American pastoral in terms of mediation between art and nature,the savage and the civilised, the rural and the urban. It is this last interpretation of ‘middle ground’ which is most pertinent to my subject.

From among the seven novellas in the anthology, I have chosen Thomas’s‘Prospero on the Island’ (1972), Lowry’s ‘The Forest Path to the Spring’(1961) and Wilson’s ‘Tuesday and Wednesday’ (1952) for close focus. In all three, the opposition between ‘wilderness’ and ‘sophistication’, and themiddle ground between them, may be explored both at the level of themeand in terms of narrative perspective. Towards the end, I will turn briefly tonon-fiction writing in order to consider some direct uses of the two words in Canadian texts from the middle decades of the twentieth century. Ratherthan tracing a chronological development across this period, I am offering a kind of conceptual map. It is partly framed using critical books from thesame decades. This is because I am looking at ‘wilderness’ and ‘sophistication’as keywords in the Raymond Williams sense; the critical texts I cite providefurther instances of the way the words were used, and the conceptsunderstood, during the mid-century era. Also, these books – through their surveys of larger regional or national canons – indicate the potential of my localised study to open out towards a broader understanding of theinterrelation of ‘wilderness’ and ‘sophistication’ in modern Canadian culture.

The place to begin, as Audrey Thomas suggests, is with the roots of words,because this takes us deep into the language and, metaphorically, deep into the land.2 The meaning of ‘sophistication’ has changed considerably over time,and so has the kind of cultural work it performs. Etymologically, it derives from‘sophia’, the Greek word for wisdom, which at first designated spiritual insightand subsequently knowledge and learning. From this came the name ‘Sophist’,given to a set of itinerant Greek educators and rhetoricians of the fifth centuryBCE. Growing resistance to the Sophists centred on their preparedness to argueboth sides of a question, their moral relativism and individualism, and theiremphasis on self-presentation. Thus, the term ‘sophistry’ came to designatefalsification or disingenuous reasoning, and the adjective ‘sophisticated’ remaineda pejorative term right up until the nineteenth century. The Oxford English

2 WILDERNESS / SOPHISTICATION

2 In ‘Basmati Rice: An Essay on Words’, Thomas explores her fascination with etymology, figuresof speech and (mis)translations. On her wordplay, see Ricou, ‘Word Work.’

Dictionary gives its older meanings as ‘adulterated; not pure or genuine’ (1607-1897); and ‘altered from, deprived of, primitive simplicity ornaturalness’ (1603-1963).3 I have argued elsewhere that the decline ofRomanticism, with its idealization of sentiment, sensibility, and naturalness,opened the way for the elaboration of an alternative set of values that wemight now associate with sophistication. In addition, the rise of the middleclass, with its insistent appropriation of aristocratic markers of distinction,made sophistication increasingly desirable as a social strategy.4 To theVictorians, sophisticated social performance became important preciselybecause of their excessive investment in truth-telling,5 while in the earlytwentieth century, the word began to take on some of its current meanings,defined by the OED as ‘worldly wisdom or experience, subtlety, discrimination’(from 1850), and ‘technical refinement’ (from 1959). Although these becamethe dominant meanings, the earlier ones are not quite obsolete, and traces ofthem remain in modern usage.

Turning to ‘wilderness’, the OED’s first definition is the most literal: ‘wild oruncultivated land’ (c.1200-1847). The second specifies an article (as in ‘thewilderness’), and is more emotive: ‘uninhabited or inhabited only by wildanimals’ (c.1230-1855). This is supplemented by a phrase from Johnson’sdictionary: ‘a tract of solitude and savageness’, which introduces a humanperspective. The OED also gives a figurative or religious meaning: ‘a region of wild or desolate character, or in which one wanders or loses one's way'(1340-1868); here, the focus is entirely on the relation of humans to thewilderness. The OED’s dating suggests that all these meanings were currentonly up until the mid-nineteenth century. I find this curious as it seems to methat contemporary usage is still inflected by ideas of solitude, wildness, anddisorientation. But there is one meaning in the list which is genuinely archaic:‘a piece of ground in a large garden or park, planted with trees, and laid outin an ornamental or fantastic style, often in the form of a maze or labyrinth’(1644-1885). Already we find sophistication in the midst of wilderness: ahidden definition of the word which seems to be in tension with all the rest,since instead of wildness and uncultivation, it points to the most artificial oflandscaping techniques. Yet it retains the notion of wandering and losingone’s way. The maze partly replicates the experience of being lost in a forest,but always within the ultimately safe environment of the park or garden.


3 The date ranges indicate the earliest and latest exemplary quotations in the OED online.4 For more detail on this shift, see Hammill, Sophistication 23-33; 65-77.5 This is the argument of Kucich’s The Power of Lies; see especially 3-4.

The basis of the distinction between the wilderness and the garden, as theCanadian critic W.H. New points out in Land Sliding (1997), is an attitude toproperty. For European explorers in the New World, he explains, ‘wilderness’was beyond the reach of law, while ‘land’ could be privately owned: ‘Suchownership declared authority; it also expressed a participation in a system of civilorder or organization, or a shared notion of “cultivation”. Hence the (cultivated)garden was civil, but the wilderness was “untractable”: unruled, hence unruly’(29).6 In the earlier phases of Canadian literary history, the reassuring image ofthe garden awaiting cultivation was frequently used, and became a mode ofdefence against a potentially threatening natural environment. This pattern isanalysed in detail in one of the major books about western Canadian literature,Dick Harrison’s Unnamed Country (1977).7 Harrison writes that early twentieth-century prairie fiction was characterised by:

a moral simplicity – an innocence which is not necessarily purity but an absence of civilized sophistication. As the wise old doctor in NellieMcClung's Purple Springs says, ‘this big West is new and crude and distinct– only the primary colours are used in the picture, there are no half-tones,no shadows … no background’. … This is essentially the moral perspectivewhich underlies the fiction of Stead and Stringer too, and in the work ofConnor and McClung particularly it is accompanied by the sort of naïvesocial conscience which provides the complex human problems of the Westwith superficially logical solutions like prohibition, industry, thrift, and simplepiety. It is also the moral perspective of the most sentimental romance,which was quite predictably the genre in which these writers worked.… The old doctor's contention that there is ‘no background’ suggestsanother of the Edenic qualities of the fictional West of this period. It hasno past. … the popular fiction generally gives the impression that nothinghappened until the white settlers arrived. This loss of the past can now beseen as a measure of how dangerously out of touch with the land thisgarden vision of the West was. True, it implied harmony with nature, butin a millennial perfection, not in the sense of man as a continuing part ofthe great cycle of life on the plains. (79-80)


6 See also Hanson’s account of the ‘landed vocation’ in Victorian writing: ‘In English literature,Canadian land promised the return to an integrated life; but more importantly, it proffered thefantasy of gentility to Victorians anxious to secure or maintain that status and offered a socialidentity (landed gentry) that was indelibly “English”‘ (xxx).

7 The other key study of prairie writing from this era is Ricou's Vertical Man / Horizontal World(1973). Some of the conclusions of these thematic studies are broadly relevant to ‘westernCanadian writing’, a category usually taken to include BC as well as the prairies.

I would like to pick up two things here. First, the qualities celebrated in these settler fictions – prohibition, industry, thrift and piety – are particularlyincompatible with sophistication. The personal attributes, and socialideologies, which favoured survival in a frontier environment are the oppositeof those which would enable characters to thrive in European novels ofmanners – such as polished manners, wit, an unshockable attitude, a refusalof effortfulness, and an ability to negotiate complicated social landscapes.8

These things would be of little use on a remote settlement, and indeed, many Canadian novels suggest that sophistication inspires distrust in pioneercommunities. The second point to note is that Harrison reverses the notion of sophistication as a corruption or ‘adulteration’ of innocence, insteadpresenting innocence as a failure of sophistication. His analysis works by lining up innocence, simplicity (or oversimplification) and sentiment againstsophistication and complexity.9 Harrison’s readings suggest that ‘civilizedsophistication’ is absent not only from the fictional worlds represented in thesepopular novels, but also from the narratives themselves, which are formallyconventional and ideologically simplistic.

In the novellas I am going to examine, which date from a somewhat later era,innocence and sophistication remain opposed to one another. Yet they are nolonger mutually exclusive, but interdependent, and constitutive of a complexpastoral discourse which is not found in the novels discussed by Harrison.Indeed, Harrison notes: ‘The Garden Myth in Canadian fiction is characterizedby an abundance of what might be called “pastoral” imagery and by a moreor less explicit moral assumption that nature is regenerative and man and his artificial creations are trivial or corrupt’ (75). His inverted commasacknowledge that the popular novels he discusses are not ‘true’ pastoral texts,because although they represent an idealised rural space, the pastoral sense of loss is largely absent. The literary mode of pastoral has been extensivelydiscussed by critics over many decades; among the most influential definitionsare those of William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) andRaymond Williams in The Country and the City (1973). In Empson’s terms,the basis of pastoral is ‘a double attitude of the artist to the worker, of thecomplex man to the simple one (“I am in one way better, in another not so


8 For a detailed definition of sophistication as it is generally elaborated in literary texts, see theintroduction to Litvak’s Strange Gourmets.

9 Compare Marx’s ‘distinction between two kinds of pastoralism – one that is popular andsentimental, the other imaginative and complex’ (5).

good”)’ (19). That is, in order to appreciate rural simplicity or untutoredsensibility, readers must be aware that they themselves have lost – or neverpossessed – these qualities. For Williams: ‘The eventual structure of feeling isnot based only on an idea of the happier past. It is based also on that otherand associated idea of innocence: the rural innocence of the pastoral. ... Thekey to its analysis is the contrast of the country with the city and the court:here nature, there worldliness’ (46). Pastoral texts, then, map out innocenceand sophistication in space, associating one with the natural environment andthe other with the city.10 Often, the interaction between them is played out inan intermediate site which is part-wild and part-cultivated – such as a garden,urban park, island or agricultural landscape – the ‘middle ground’.

In a modern context, pastoral writing sometimes invokes the tourist gaze: for instance, the perspective of a city-dweller setting out on an adventure in a wild environment, but always retaining the possibility of retreat. In turn, this raises questions about the authenticity of a wilderness experience which doesnot involve actual risk.11 Audrey Thomas’s ‘Prospero on the Island’,12 is intenselypreoccupied with authenticity and imitation. Since artifice is at the core of allsophisticated practices, it can be argued that the story thematises sophistication as well as embodying it in its narrative form. It is set on one of the outer islands in the Georgia Strait, British Columbia, and is about a young couple with a babywho move there and live in a cabin. The main character, Miranda, is terrified bycity life and comes to the island seeking refuge, yet she is constantly aware of the divergence between her fantasy of remote wilderness living and the actualmodernity which surrounds her:


10 New observes: ‘Recurrently, “City” represents (across a range of perspectives) a mix of wealth,power, noise, violence, sleaze, crowding, corruption, potential anonymity, multicultural proximities,aesthetic ferment, the loss of old values, the acquisition of new values, and sophistication’ (LandSliding 156). 'City' has an entry in Williams’ Keywords and in the collaborative 2005 volume NewKeywords (although ‘sophistication’ and ‘wilderness’ appear in neither). The 2005 entry on ‘city’comments on the ‘philosophical edge’ to the notion of the city, legible in the terms used to describethe qualities needed for living in close proximity to strangers: ‘“Civility” (from civis) is obviously one,along with “civilization”. More ambiguous is “urbanity” (from L urbs), with its double-edged nod tothe collective nature of city life and the style of the city slicker‘ (Donald 34).

11 Urry, in The Tourist Gaze, explains: ‘the gaze in any historical period is constructed in relation toits opposite, to non-tourist forms of social experience and consciousness’ (1-2). See also hiscomments on authenticity (9-11) and on the '"romantic" form of the tourist gaze, in which theemphasis is upon solitude [and] privacy’ (45).

12 Thomas’s work has generated a reasonably substantial body of criticism, mostly published in thelate 1980s and early 1990s. Just two articles (Colvile; Bowering) have been devoted to her pairof novellas, published as Munchmeyer; and Prospero on the Island (1971).

There is nothing to fear; no bears out there in the forest, no poison berries(that I know of, anyway), no kerosene lamps to tip over. I even have astreet light just below the path. Marie Antoinette playing at milkmaid atthe palace of Versailles. … Fred even rigged up an ingenious system ofplastic pipes which lead from the hot-water heater in the kitchen outsideand around the back of the cabin, in and connected to the hot-water tapin the bathtub. No hip baths in front of the fire for me! A façade ofsimplicity: a small white cabin set up on the bluff, a simple stockade fence,smoke coming from a chimney. The figures of a woman and a small childand a mongrel dog come towards you down the path. The woman carriesa dented saucepan. They are going to pick wild berries, the last of thesummer, and will have them, after a salmon, for their supper.‘Look’, you say, stopping at the store for a bag of chips, a soft drink,directions to the marina. ‘See them. Aren’t they sweet?’ And sigh andtaste the city's dust still clinging to the inside of your mouth. ‘It must be nice.’ ‘The simple life.’ Words to that effect. (247)

There is a comparison, of course, with pioneer experience – or at least, withour received image of it.13 The dangers listed at the start of this passagesuggest the many hazards in a narrative such as Susanna Moodie’s RoughingIt in the Bush (1852), and whilst Miranda is grateful not to face these, she isalso conscious of experiencing only a simulated rusticity. The improbable streetlight is a sign of the invasion of the urban into the supposedly wild place, andsignals Miranda’s sense of herself as equally incongruous. She fears she issimply a spectator, a tourist from the city, and in positioning herself this way,she becomes aligned with the reader, looking on rather than fully participatingin the simple, slow-paced, low-tech life of the island.

‘Simplicity’ (like ‘innocence’, ‘niceness’ and ‘sentimentality’) is a possibleopposite term for sophistication. For the self-conscious, literate Miranda,simplicity can only be ‘a façade’, or a performance. Her mention of Marie-Antoinette is revealing. In the eighteenth century, aristocratic fantasies aboutthe simple life were enacted through very self-aware masquerades, andMarie-Antoinette famously dressed as a shepherdess or dairymaid at hermodel farm, Le Petit Trianon. Similar motifs informed some of the earliestliterary depictions of Canada in English literature. In Frances Brooke’s TheHistory of Emily Montague, published in 1769, the actual hardship of peasant


13 ‘Pioneering’ is another complex keyword; I do not have space to explore its resonances here, butsee Hanson on middle-class conceptualisations of ‘landed vocation’ in colonial territory; alsoThompson on Canadian models of pioneer femininity.


life in New France is erased, as the story focuses on the privileged Englishruling class, and their enjoyment of Canada’s picturesqueness. EmilyMontague and her lover imagine forming a permanent agricultural settlementamong the Acadians, planning to build ‘a pretty house in a beautiful rusticstyle’ in which they will live ‘like the first pair in Paradise’ (223). Their ties to England, however, prove too strong to be broken, and the novel quicklyretreats from its own New World wilderness fantasy. All the characters crossback over the Atlantic, having spent only a year at Quebec.14

Similarly, in Audrey Thomas’s novella, Miranda and her husband stay on the island only one year, just long enough for her to face up to her fear of modern urban life, and gather the material for a book. The last entry inMiranda’s diary reads: ‘I write this on the ferry, gazing backward’ (284). This plot derives, of course, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest,15 and morebroadly from a whole tradition of early modern pastoral writing whichstrongly influenced North American literature. In his important book The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America(1964), Leo Marx writes of The Tempest:

the symbolic action, as in our American fables, has three spatial stages. Itbegins in a corrupt city, passes through a raw wilderness, and then, finally,leads back towards the city. But ... there is now some hope that what hasbeen learned on the island can be applied to the world. What has beenlearned, needless to say, is not the lesson of primitivism. So far as theending lends credibility to the pastoral hope, it endorses the way ofProspero, not that of Gonzalo; the model for political reform is neitherMilan nor the island as they existed in the beginning; it is a symbolicmiddle landscape created by mediation between art and nature. (71)

The ‘middle landscape’ is a spatial metaphor which can be understood inseveral different senses. Marx traces it back to the rhetoric of the AmericanEnlightenment, quoting from the Unitarian minister Richard Price: ‘thehappiest state of man is the middle state between the savage and the refined,or between the wild and the luxurious state’.16 In a more literal interpretation,the ‘middle landscape’ is partly in a natural state and partly developed.17 In

14 As Perkins notes, Brooke constructed ‘a version of British North America which balances theisolation and hardship described in so many adventure novels and travellers' tales with accountsof sophisticated social pleasures’ (433). The dynamic between sophistication and wilderness iscrucial to Emily Montague; see also Hammill, ‘A Daughter’ 441-443.

15 The timescale is compressed: Shakespeare's characters live on the island twelve years.


both of these senses, the idea is directly relevant to Malcolm Lowry's novella‘The Forest Path to the Spring’.

Lowry, an English author, has been adopted into Canadian literature becausehe lived for a time in British Columbia and set some of his work there,including ‘The Forest Path to the Spring’, written in 1951 and published in his posthumous collection Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place(1961).18 In the story, the unnamed narrator and his wife go for a honeymoonto Eridanus, a tiny, precarious beach settlement, and they love it so much that, in spite of the primitive living conditions, they decide to stay. The story,like Frances Brooke and Audrey Thomas’s texts, is mostly taken up with thenarration of a single year’s experience, although the narrating point of view is at many years’ remove from the main events. The beauty of Eridanus isevoked in passages of a lyrical intensity:

We went out to a morning of wild ducks doing sixty downwind andgolden-crowned kinglets feeding in swift jingling multitudinous flightthrough the leafless bushes, and another day of winter companionshipwould draw down to an evening of wind, cloud, and seagulls blowing fourways at once, and a black sky above the trembling desolate alders, theheart clothed already in their delicate green jewelry I had never really seen,and the gulls whitely soaring against that darkness, where suddenly nowappeared the moon behind clouds, as the wind dropped, transillumining its own soaring moonshot depths in the water, the moon reflected in thehalf-moonlit clouds in the water down there, and behind, in the sametranslunar depths, the reflection of the struts and cross-braces of our

16 Cited in Marx 105. Price was a friend of Jefferson and Franklin. Compare Marx’s comment:‘What is attractive in pastoralism is the felicity represented by an image of a natural landscape, aterrain either unspoiled or, if cultivated, rural. Movement towards such a symbolic landscape alsomay be understood as movement away from an “artificial” world, … away from centers ofcivilization towards their opposite, nature, away from sophistication towards simplicity, or, tointroduce the cardinal metaphor of the literary mode, away from the city toward the country'(9-10).

17 Gustaffson, in his ecocritical essay on Lowry’s ‘Forest Path’, uses ‘middle landscape’ in thissecond sense (28). Whilst I haven't explicitly framed this essay in contemporary ecocritical terms,several of the critics I cite are seen as precursors of this mode of reading, and are included inCoupe's pioneering Green Studies Reader (2000).

18 Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), set in Mexico, has received far more critical discussion thanany of Thomas’s or Wilson’s books. Lowry’s Canadian writing has received much less attention.About ten essays concentrate wholly or partly on ‘Forest Path’; I do not cite the most recent oneas it is apparently plagiarised from Gustaffson.

simple-minded pier, safe for another day, disposed subaqueously in someancient complex harmony of architectural beauty, an inverse moonlightgeometry, beyond our conscious knowledge. (39)

This single sentence is a verbal structure of remarkable intricacy: it refers tocomplex harmony and it also embodies it. The passage does not present thepoint of view of a simple country dweller, but rather that of a person of subtleintellect who has recently learned to pay attention to wildlife, moonrises, andeven the accidental beauty of manmade structures. Indeed, one aspect of thenarrator’s sophisticated response to the natural environment is his ability toincorporate even industrial objects into the frame of the picturesque: he usesthe phrase ‘architectural beauty’ again when referring to the oil refinery (59),and comments on how the smoke from the factories enhances the lovelinessof the sunrise.19 This might be another version of Leo Marx’s ‘middlelandscape’ – between the wilderness and the urban, and also between art andnature, because the narrator's full realisation of the beauty of the place seemsto be achieved partly through writing about it.

As Henrik Gustaffson observes: 'With the landscape in its partly damaged andever threatened state, and the constantly shifting influences of civilization onboth environment and people, it is evident that “Forest Path” presents a pastoralmore by trustful perception than ready substance' (37). On the basis of hisreading of Lowry, Gustaffson suggests that ‘simplicity must increasingly be seenas a deliberate contrast to modern, compound experience, not as a self-sufficientor merely given trait’, and concludes that modern pastoral will therefore alwaysinvolve conflict (37). Clearly, then, the perspective of the sophisticate is evident inthe continual counterpointing of the simple and the complex, and equally, in theself-conscious juxtaposition of wilderness with the urban. When Lowry's narratorreturns briefly to the city to get some books, he feels that ‘the city ... in a fewhours, had begun to render our existence an almost impossible fable’ (38). Thecity and the beach settlement are necessarily defined against one another, yet theexperience of each renders the other unreal. In a longer extract (which, again,consists of just one sentence), the city dweller’s vision of Eridanus is presented byembedding the reader in the scene:

If you can imagine yourself taking a pleasure steamer down the inlet fromthe city some afternoon, ... on the port side beneath the white peaks andthe huge forestation of the mountain slopes would be tide-flats, a gravel


19 See Gustaffson (36) on the narrator's endowment of industrial structures with beauty.

pit, the Indian reserve, a barge company, and then the point where thewild roses were blowing and the mergansers nested, with the lighthouseitself; it was here, once around the point with the lighthouse droppingastern, that you would be cutting across our bay with our little cabinsunder the trees on the beach where we lived at Eridanus, and that was ourpath going along the bank; but you would be able to see what we couldnot, right around the next point at Four Bells, into Eridanus Port – or, ifthis happens to be today, what was Eridanus Port and is now a real estatesubsection; perhaps you would still see people waving at you before thatthough, and the man with the megaphone who points out the sightswould say contemptuously, ‘Squatters; the government’s been trying toget them off for years’, and that would be ourselves, my wife and me,waving to you gaily; and then you would have passed our bay and besailing directly northwards into the snow-covered mountain peaks, pastnumerous enchanting uninhabited islands of tall pines, down graduallyinto the narrowing gorge and to the uttermost end of that marvellousregion of wilderness known to the Indians as Paradise. (7–8)

As in the Audrey Thomas passage, the reader is addressed as ‘you’, andpositioned as a spectator or tourist. Like Thomas’s Miranda, Lowry’s narrator is anxious about the authenticity of his rural experience: although he lives in a tiny, isolated settlement, he does not have access to the really remotewilderness area, designated as ‘Paradise’. This is described as ‘uninhabited’,yet it is also suggested to be the terrain of Indians – implying that the narratorviews the Indians almost as a separate species, with no ownership of the landand yet with a more authentic or intimate relationship to it. Yet, he and hiswife are themselves perceived as a separate kind of people, ‘squatters’, by the passing day-trippers.

From a Native perspective, of course, all white settlers might be considered‘squatters’. Race is deeply relevant to representations of wilderness andsophistication, but I have not focused on it here, since the texts I am lookingat make only these kinds of glancing references. In future work, there wouldbe many possible ways of approaching this subject. The dynamic between thesavage and the civilised which structures early Canadian exploration narrativeswould be a good place to start, and this theme could be carried right throughto the entanglement of Native issues with conservationism in modern policydebate. The changing treatment of Native peoples in the contemporary period


can, in some ways, be related to new perceptions of their cultures as complexand sophisticated, yet the white fascination with Native lifestyles remainsinseparable from wilderness fantasies.20

Near the beginning of the narrative, Lowry's narrator observes: ‘Since wewere in a bay within the inlet, the city ... was invisible to us, behind us on the path, was our feeling’ (7), a comment which inverts the idea of the city as a site of progress. In the account of the steamer journey quoted above, the proleptic reference to the real estate subsection presents a more directimage of regression, while the phrase ‘if this happens to be today’ introduceschronological layering to the extract, drawing attention to the pace ofdevelopment at Eridanus. Ideals of progress are further interrogated when the narrator describes his own effort to face up to a painful past:

In a manner I changed [the past] by changing myself and having changed it found it necessary to pass beyond the pride I felt in my accomplishment,and to accept myself as a fool again. ... Nothing is more humbling than thewreckage of a burned house, the fragments of consumed work. But it isnecessary not to take pride in such masterly pieces of damnation either,especially when they have become so nearly universal. If we had progressed,I thought, it was as if to a region where such words as spring, water, houses,trees, vines, laurels, mountains, wolves, bay, roses, beach, islands, forest,tides and deer and snow and fire, had realized their true being, or had theirsource: and as these words on a page once stood merely to what theysymbolized, so did the reality we knew now stand to something else beyondthat symbolized or reflected: it was as if we were clothed in the kind ofreality which before we saw only at a distance. (62–63)

Like Audrey Thomas in her line about the roots of words, Lowry reflects onthe materiality of words, embedding them in a particular landscape. Yet forLowry’s narrator, the ‘source’ of the words he lists is not to be found in olddictionaries, but in physical referents – he tries to reunite words and things,aspiring towards an unmediated experience of a landscape he has previouslyencountered only through text. As Robert Kroetsch writes in his essay on theHear Us O Lord collection: ‘We live at a time when poetry – Canadian poetryat least – is full of the etymologies of words, as if an earlier version of a word


20 From another angle, questions of authenticity and imposture might be explored in relation to John Richardson’s Wacousta (1832) or the literary career of Grey Owl. See also Calder on authenticity and regional literature.

had a privileged status against all the problematics of meaning in our fumblingcentury. Lowry returns us from that false innocence to the circuit or situationof communication itself’ (Treachery 164).21 The narrators in both Thomas’sand Lowry’s novellas struggle, in different ways, to prioritise the immediateexperience of place over the language used to describe it, yet both areultimately caught up in the experience of writing. The passage I have justquoted from ‘The Forest Path’ also suggests that the condition of humblenessought to preclude pride, yet, as the narrator implies, as soon as you are awareof yourself as humble or innocent, you are so no longer. Self-consciousness, in these texts, immediately brings a kind of sophistication, and one which isnecessarily understood as impurity or adulteration.

Lowry and Thomas present the complex protagonist striving for simplicity, butunable to escape self-consciousness. Another BC writer, Ethel Wilson, does theopposite – that is, she represents simple characters from the perspective of adetached yet sympathetic narrator.22 For this, pastoral structures of feeling areagain required, but they are differently balanced. In her novella ‘Tuesday andWednesday’, Wilson’s delicate modulation from admiration to irony is nicelyexemplified in this description:

Mrs Emblem locked her door, and breathed a deep sigh of comfort. Wellshe might. A pleasant glow of sentiment was shed by a light rosily shadedand suffused. Mrs Emblem advanced into the room and turned on twolamps also rosily and cosily shaded. These lights so pinkly suffusedrevealed the neatness and cleanness of Mrs Emblem’s room. It was a roomwith a small ell. The ell was divided from the main part of the room bylong rose-coloured curtains which at once suggested a delicious thoughprecarious privacy, an unravished something. How pleasant it was for MrsEmblem to go to bed behind those curtains, ... some chocolates near athand, a pink or blue dressing jacket loosely upon her white shoulders ...No one has seen Mrs Emblem lying luxuriously there; but I see her now,and she looks so nice, she makes me feel good. (95)


21 Kroetsch's last phrase comes from Jonathan Culler’s The Pursuit of Signs (1981).22 Wilson's most sustained exploration of an attractively simple protagonist is in The Innocent

Traveller (1949). See Hammill, ‘Ethel Wilson’. Criticism on Wilson focuses principally on SwampAngel; most studies date from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. See the comprehensive bibliographyin Stouck (2003); very little has appeared since 2003. There are no essays on 'Tuesday andWednesday’, but see Stouck’s discussion (114-160).

We are invited to admire Mrs Emblem for her straightforward pleasure in material comfort and her almost childlike delight in pretty things. Yet in celebrating Mrs Emblem's unsophistication, the text simultaneouslyconstructs a sophisticated reading position for its readers. The qualitiesattaching to her, ‘niceness’ and ‘sentimentality’, combine to designate anunreflective, emotionally-based respectability which is the opposite ofsophistication. Readers are not really encouraged to empathise with thischaracter, but to spy on her and, ultimately, to disdain her vulgar taste. The description of the room continues:

It is furnished with repulsively ornate chairs and a couch upholstered in a material which might be rose-coloured plush, but is not. ... There are no books in Mrs Emblem ’s sitting room because she does not read books.Books are untidy, and there is no need of them. There is a shiny woodenchest or bench in which there are all-story, fashion or movie magazines putaway. It is easy to be funny about the furniture-store romantic appearanceof Mrs Emblem’s room, and for Myrtle to say that it is pink like a badhouse. But it is not a bad house; it is a good house ... Although she is Mrs Emblem and therefore a happy woman, shesometimes feels a certain vacuity which is not filled by cleaning andpolishing her room, shopping … going to a show, and playing whist orbridge. … She is hardly aware of the poignant communications of sky, of birds, of ocean, forest, and mountain. …You cannot help liking Mrs Emblem. She is so nice; she is perhaps too fat,now, to be beautiful; but she is – to Mr Thorsteinsen, to Maybelle, toMortimer Johnson and to me – alluring. (95–96)

The sudden shock of the word ‘repulsively’ unmasks the narrator and also the audience. While explicitly inviting us to take pleasure in the spectacle ofMrs Emblem’s plump prettiness, the narrator has also secretly encouraged usto deplore her taste. The complicity between narrator and reader is reinforcedby the irony of the sentence in free indirect style (‘Books are untidy…’), andfinally, the direct address to ‘you’ interpellates us as knowing and amused,fully aware of the limitations of this character's point of view. But Myrtle, Mrs Emblem’s subtly manipulative niece, also deplores her aunt’s taste, andthus we are trapped, aligned with Myrtle (who is a rather nasty piece of work)and so unable, after all, to share in Mrs Emblem’s niceness. This fits Empson'sdefinition of pastoral: the reader is the complex man, who feels ‘I am in oneway better, in another not so good’. Mrs Emblem is ‘good’ in the sense ofstraightforward kindness, but the reader cannot help feeling superior to herbecause she is so unresponsive to culture and nature alike.


In her novellas and short fiction, Wilson often focuses on characters who – likeMrs Emblem – do not relate to the natural environment. In contrast, the novelfor which she is best known, Swamp Angel (1954), draws on a moreconventional (though complex) mode of pastoral. Its central character, Maggie,finds solace amongst lakes and forests after a period of suffering. This narrativeof retreat, in which a protagonist experiences healing and learns courage, hassimilarities to ‘The Forest Path to the Spring’ and ‘Prospero on the Island’; in allthree stories, the main characters are self-conscious about their wildernessexperience and its authenticity. In most of Wilson’s fiction, as in that of Lowryand Thomas, it is the educated, cultured people from the city who come to know the rural environment the most intimately. This means that even the mostimmersive kinds of wilderness texts are inevitably invaded by sophistication, andthis precludes the immediacy of response which the protagonists long for.

In a 1958 lecture, Wilson discussed her favourite Canadian authors, amongthem Sinclair Ross and Robertson Davies:

Mr. Davies’ wide range of experience, sophistication (not in the glossymagazine sense of the word), learning, and sense of the comic scenecombine in each of his books with his acquaintance among people andbehaviours. ... Robertson Davies’ urbane and often witty works are farremoved from the hard circumstances of As For Me and My House, butboth are Canadian. (‘Approach’ 93–94)

Wilson is speaking of an intellectual conception of sophistication, a stylishnessand wit that is not superficial but revelatory. She seems keen to counteract acommon perception that sophistication is somehow not Canadian, because itis incompatible with the austere determination and silent suffering induced bya pioneer environment. Whilst this view is rarely articulated directly in fiction,it is made explicit in other kinds of text, such as Wilson's lecture. The othermid-century examples I have found come from political philosophy andliterary criticism, though I will turn first to a piece of interwar magazinewriting, which anticipates these later texts.

An idea which has circulated for many decades in mainstream Canadianculture is that Canadians should prize their supposed unsophistication asa moral and even a commercial asset, and a crucial way of distinguishingthemselves from Americans. This notion was current as early as the 1920s. In January 1927, an article on revenues from tourist traffic appeared inMaclean’s. It was contributed by J. Herbert Hodgins, an influential journalistand editor who became managing editor of the highly sophisticated Mayfair


magazine when it was launched in Toronto later that year. In his Maclean’sarticle, he points out that a large proportion of tourist revenue comes from USvisitors, and describes encounters with American tourists who enthused aboutthe politeness of Canadians and their courteous treatment of visitors. Hodginsproposes that ‘there is something to be gained, economically, from adherenceto the old-fashioned virtues’ (60), and reinforces his argument by quotingfrom the writings of Elbert Hubbard, Jr:

‘I like the Canadians. They are more natural, serious, unsophisticated, stillhaving much of the pioneer spirit. … There is less lawlessness in Canadabecause of an inherent respect for law and its makers. The free and easyAmerican spirit may percolate across the border and spoil our neigbors’dignity in time, but just now they are ahead of us.’

Whilst these stereotyped accounts sound faintly ludicrous, they provedremarkably enduring. Forty years later, George Grant wrote in extremelysimilar terms about the US and Canada in Lament for a Nation (1965). He says that settlers in Canada tried to build:

a society with a greater sense of order and restraint than freedom-lovingrepublicanism would allow. It was no better defined than a kind ofsuspicion that we in Canada could be less lawless and have a greater senseof propriety than the United States. … English-speaking Canadians havebeen called a dull, stodgy, and indeed costive lot. In these dynamic days,such qualities are made particularly unattractive to the chic. Yet ourstodginess has made us a society of greater simplicity, formality, andperhaps even innocence than the people to the south. (69)

And Grant adds a sarcastic footnote: ‘In his recent book The Scotch …Professor J. K. Galbraith has patronized his ancestors from western Ontario in this vein. A great human advance has been made from the Presbyterianfarm to the sophistication of Harvard’ (69).

He invokes several of the terms I've been discussing, placing ‘sophistication’ on the dark side, and presenting some of its possible opposites, simplicity andinnocence, as virtues. He is referring to an active kind of innocence – notunawareness, but rather what he writes of as a Presbyterian ‘ethic of self-restraint’, as opposed to the ‘ethic of freedom’ which characterized Americanliberalism (69). It is also worth noting that Grant rejects ‘chic’ along withsophistication. Certainly, in both media and literary texts in the twentieth century,sophistication is often understood in terms of a chic, fashionable lifestyle and


can therefore be seen as trivialising or inauthentic; this, presumably, is why Ethel Wilson distanced herself from ‘the glossy magazine sense of the word’.

In Canadian writing, then, an implicit opposition between sophistication andwilderness is used as a structuring principle in a variety of contexts. I havefound only one essay in which the terms are set explicitly against one another.A 1968 piece by W. H. New, it again takes up the American tourist’s view ofCanada, but in a satirical tone:

In the comparatively recent annals of the tourist bureau in Victoria, BritishColumbia, is the case of the redoubtable American lady who demanded tosee the icebergs now that she was in Canada. ‘They never come this farsouth,’ she was told, ... ‘but they sometimes appear off the coast ofAlaska.’ ‘Impossible,’ was the reply; ‘Alaska is in the United States.’ Andthat was, ineffably, that. But life goes on in the Canadian wilderness, and sophistication isbeginning to creep in. The huskies are disappearing from our streetcorners, and the Mounties have exchanged their scarlet tunics for moreserviceable brown ones. Soon we may have to stop living in igloos, andthen where will the Canadian image be? (‘Wellspring’ 123)

This passage evokes the words ‘wilderness’ and ‘sophistication’ as clichés,responding to the persistent construction of Canada in antimodern terms, as a place of escape from the frenzy of urban life, or as a picturesque,anachronistic respite from commercialised American culture. In fact, the notionthat wilderness is located outside culture is untenable, and New's anecdotepoints us towards that insight. The remainder of his essay discusses theoutstanding Canadian writers of the early and mid-twentieth century, and he mentions two of those I have been examining:

Beside Lowry almost anyone pales, but Mrs Wilson, choosing a much moreapparently simple (and so deceptive) way with words, still holds her own.The great danger is that readers will dismiss her after skimming, imputingto her work the shallowness of pulp magazines, but that would be unjust.Skimming will not do; to close reading, her works respond beautifully.(130)

‘Sophistication’ is a term which is often applied by critics to Ethel Wilson’swriting, yet her work is not sophisticated in the modernist sense (in thelexicon of modernist criticism, ‘technical’ or ‘formal’ sophistication usuallyimplies difficulty). To understand why Wilson is described in this way, it is


necessary to look back at one of the earliest meanings of the word, which I gave at the beginning of this essay: 'altered from, deprived of, primitivesimplicity or naturalness'. Indeed, a certain deceptiveness, or feignedsimplicity, is present in many modern Canadian texts which explore thesubject of wilderness, and this is one reason why a reading practice whichcentres on sophistication can be so illuminating in relation to Canadianliterature. This returns us, finally, to William Empson. In Some Versions ofPastoral, he discusses a dialogue from As You Like It between Touchstone and Audrey. They are talking of lovers and poets and the Clown puns on‘fain’ (longing) and ‘feign’ (deceit). Empson’s comment reveals theinseparability of the two ideas I have been discussing – he says of love-poets:‘For that matter they are wooing the reader even if they are not trying toseduce a mistress; the process at its simplest involves desire and detachment,nature and sophistication; levels mysteriously inter-related which a sane manseparates only for a joke’ (114).23


23 In my current research, I am working in collaboration with Michelle Smith on an AHRC-fundedproject, ‘Magazines, Travel and Middlebrow Culture in Canada, 1925-1960’(www.middlebrowcanada.org). In the version of this paper presented at the BACS conference, I discussed the visual repertoire of sophistication through analysis of magazine covers andillustrations. This material is difficult to reproduce in printed format; also the arguments are thejoint property of both researchers. We will continue to reflect on the interactions betweenwilderness and sophistication in our writing, and I acknowledge Dr Smith’s importantcontribution to my thinking on this topic. I am most grateful for her comments on this paper,and for those of Paul Hjartarson, Isla Duncan, Sarah Galletly, and Laurence Coupe.

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24 WILDERNES / SOPHISTICATIONECCLES CENTRE FOR AMERICAN STUDIES PLENARY LECTURES AT THEBRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR CANADIAN STUDIES ANNUAL CONFERENCE

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2008 Governance, Globalization and Unruly Populations: Governing the Aboriginal Cross-Border Economy in Canada, by Jane Gilmore-Dickson

2009 Mouthy Enemies: Canadian Writers and the Power of Being,Belonging and Celebrity, by Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson

2010 Citizen Reader: Canadian Literature, Mass Reading Events and the Promise of Belonging, by Danielle Fuller

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Wilderness / Sophistication

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